TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Court TV) — Attorneys representing convicted killer Wade Wilson pledged to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court at a brief hearing in front of the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday.
Wade Wilson appears in court during his Spencer hearing on Aug. 27, 2024. (Court TV)
Wilson was sentenced to death for the murders of 35-year-old Kristine Melton and 43-year-old Diane Ruiz, who were killed in 2019. Wilson is not appealing his conviction: he’s challenging the legality of the death sentence.
In 2023, Florida changed state law to allow a jury to recommend a sentence of death without reaching a unanimous verdict; juries have to only reach a minimum of 8 to 4 in favor of death for a judge to impose the sentence.
In Wilson’s case, the jury voted 9-3 to impose death for Melton’s murder and 10-2 to impose death for Ruiz’s murder. The judge handed down a death sentence for both murders.
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But Wilson’s attorney, Michael Ufferman, argued in his written appeal that changing the law violated both the United States and Florida constitutions. The appeal notes that in Florida, an existing statute “expressly prohibits retroactive application of any statute ‘dealing in any way with a crime or its punishment.” At the time of Melton and Ruiz’s murders, a unanimous vote for death was required.
Appearing before the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday, Ufferman chose not to reiterate the arguments he laid out in his written motion. Acknowledging that the Court had previously upheld Florida’s 2023 death penalty law in other cases, Ufferman said he would not reargue precedent and instead wanted the record made to reflect that he was preserving his arguments to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rick Buchwalter, the attorney representing Florida at the hearing, responded, “I really don’t have any argument to make,” and asked the Court to affirm the decision of the lower Court.
The panel of justices upheld the lower Court’s ruling, with one justice quipping to the gallery, “To those in the audience, it usually doesn’t go this smoothly.”
